


Knowing

by Mad_Max



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Related, Canonical Character Death, Comfort/Angst, Gellert Grindelwald mention, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mentions of Mary Lou Barebone, Morally Ambiguous Character, Past Abuse, Percival Graves is Dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-08-10 00:02:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20126047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: Credence re-forms following the events of December 8th, 1926, and is helped by a surprising ally. And Albus Dumbledore has been waiting a very long time to make amends.





	Knowing

**Author's Note:**

> You can basically blame the Hozier song "Shrike" for this. 
> 
> The playlist for this is two songs, and I would highly recommend them while reading.
> 
> [Playlist here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3XDIELoulXtkkFBDnZtrDc?si=EWhjf0jfSciv2HHwt-An3Q)
> 
> So much gratitude to Convexity and LotusRox for all of their patience and support and feedback always.

It seemed counterintuitive, but in death he felt his body as a constant presence, a weight on the loose wisps of his conscious, tethering. He remembered in the way that he remembered everything then and knew _this was not remembering_ just seeing into a thing another time place feeling life, and in that way then he remembered that a flag will whip in the wind and tear and turn from cloth to thread although whose flag it was he could not, even straining, remember any more at all.

He felt Ma with him. Sometimes the curve of his neck beneath it the way her anger sat on him like heavy books on a shelf coated him like dust on a shelf. Sometimes rolling green seas of Midwestern grass no hills, aching, the father with the switch, the old dog with the bad leg, remembering that grass seed sprouts will ripple and dance and bend in the wind and brown and wither in hot sun no rain deep drought, aching, billowing black clouds of dust low hanging he could not tell if this was was or is or would be or anything at all. And sometimes she was with him as he knew her then when he was still a body not just tied to one and hers the hand on his wrist laying force into the joint to open the palm he thought he remembered something about deserts in the Bible and men in tents and pomegranates which he had never tasted but imagined splitting under pressure, always ripe sour spitting the seed from his teeth into the hot sand. He told himself that pomegranate sounded like palm. Everything sounded like howling. Everything was ache and rot and cold he thought about the desert and the seed and the sand, God will provide. He saw pavement tree and bush, felt himself as vapour, diffused like lady’s perfume.

(At the perfume counter the only time he’d ever tried to enter one of those fifth avenue stores in the swamp thick heat of summer the woman with the up and down eye all curled lip all _if you’re looking for a job you’ll have to ask downstairs - _)

He was, he thought, maybe somewhere in New York. Maybe nearly solid, until the next wind would hit, scatter him. New York was not entirely accurate. There was so much more space between the city and the sky than he had ever imagined. If he hadn’t been so afraid of blasphemy still despite it all he would have said he understood then what was meant by all was is will be he wondered if he ever would be again.

(He knew that Modesty was somewhere close. He also knew that close was relevant. Whatever part of him she still drew behind her like a balloon on a long string - nearly stolen again and again by the wind by passing branches skeletal and armoured still in winter bark - that part was love despite her fear of him for him or alongside it, and she was not his sister, and he was not her brother but she was   
safe, he let her go.)

Everything sounded like howling. Sometimes he thought he heard another too then, a man’s voice low voice hand on the back of his neck the way the hairs would prickle, stand stiffly. All those words would once have shamed him prickle and stiffly he could not hold the shame to him now it slipped away. It was difficult enough keeping grasp on his body.

The other man said, we never met, did we?

No.

He could never be sure how he knew that they had not met would meet once in another New York perhaps, the hand on his cheek neck, touch his body might then still recall still respond to yearn for, howling.

No, we’ve never met, said the other. I would have remembered. You look familiar. I think I’ve seen your face before, around town.

What had he ever wanted from Percival Graves? He had to cling to that name not to loose it like knotted thread to the combing fingers of the wind, aching. Everything was cold here. Here was not quite sky nor city nor water nor any Hellfire that he could ever imagine just pure open air and space between everything in all things he could see everything and felt his body and felt the wrenching, howling, mostly the cold. Mostly the cold.

I would have remembered your face, said Graves. His voice was like the sigh of the last floorboard where the hall met the main church and the crooked safety of the dark crawlspace beneath the stairs. He said, tell them not to put any poems on my stone. I can’t stand poetry.

He wanted to ask where are you? Would you have been like a father to me? Something else? Was it ever real, he wanted to know was it ever you or was it the one with the face that melted like celluloid he didn’t think so not real not blond or cold not those long fingered hands not the way the fist knocked into bone his sore nose his tense jaw the bruise where he had been shoved the spit on his chin his sobs the word squib hanging in the air between them like a curled fist.

If they really insist on poetry, said Graves, you’ll have to suggest a few verses of ‘the Great Chicago Fiendfyre’ or something of that ilk.

Just as suddenly he knew that this voice this Graves was not his. Was not there really. Had never been beside him or held him he could not hold the shame to him now it slipped away.

How is this, said Graves, recited, _Percival Graves lies at peace in this grave, and commands you disturb him not. He has died for this land, now he lies in this land. Let him rest, leave him be, let him rot._

_Ha._

He soaked Graves up in mists like unshed rain heavy pictures. Still body wrapped in black cloth beneath a black sky, black Earth, churning. Once as a child he had gone into the park, he was hungry, he ached all over he remembered, he had eaten the dirt.

You shouldn’t blame yourself, said Graves. It’s how my father went too, you know. This was my life’s work.

In the crawlspace beneath the stairs there had been a pillow, a blanket, a half-spent spare candle, a pair of underclothes folded neatly into the case of the pillow, a little wooden comb, a wind-up toy bird in a bamboo cage that he told himself never worked and he never tried his fear was too great she would hear it and take it from him like she had always taken everything from him, everything from him. He wondered if the toy was still there. He wanted to find out.

He could feel the bones in his body shift creaking the howl of everything condensing into the burning flat thing in his ribcage. Where had he found the bird? He remembered in the way that memory now was not memory but being there as it happened his hands much smaller his blue fingernail from catching his finger in the printing press his boots pinching he took the toy from the carriage with the little baby inside who was too small to enjoy it anyway and he wanted it. He wanted to have it for himself. She had always taken everything from him.

It should be marked that he had not always been good. He had never been good, even then. He coveted. It should be marked that he had stolen from an infant himself a good ten or eleven years jealous of a little body lying flat on its back in a wicker pram the mother with the basket full of apples and cabbage speaking something songlike, Italian. It should be marked that he had stolen the orange three oranges from the Jewish grocer who had come out with a broom to shoo him off shouting, leave us alone now, away with you boy you people cannot do this here in this country not in this country you are frightening the old ladies from my shop go away with you we are in America.

We are in America. It should be marked that on the same day as he had stolen the oranges, the old rabbi had stopped him laid a hand on his elbow searched his face asked him why he was out in the cold why all this hate in his hands he had not realised at first they were speaking about the pamphlets he flinched away. Go home, the rabbi said, here I’m giving you a quarter boy go and buy yourself something hot to eat give it a rest I can promise you the witches are not going anywhere if they were not here at all, buy yourself a hot dog drink some coffee even He takes a day off in the week it’s so cold. He ate the oranges behind the trash man’s wagon slipped the peels into the stinking pile. He thought he had never tasted anything so clean.

It should be marked that on the same day that he stole the oranges that the rabbi gave him the quarter he tossed the pamphlets down a gutter he thought very hard about the El. The wheels of the train. The distance between the track and the street below. He went home to Ma. He gave her the quarter and told her donations for the cause some righteous pious soul and she was pleased, she touched his arm his cheek said good boy, eat your dinner now before you go back out. It should be marked that he had not lied. 

*

He knew before it happened that he was becoming a body again not just tied to one, all the loose pieces drawn together like a push puppet when he released his thumb. He remembered Modesty telling in whisper the story of Cinderella plucking lentils from the ashes, and this was memory now, and he was becoming very solid, he thought. He searched for the bits of himself scattered to the wind like lentils, drew them close, stitched them back.

There was still cold, mostly cold. His body came back to him in splinters, needling. Here was the church, the old stovepipe twisted, the ash and dust and split wood around him like twigs in a nest. It was raining. He realised his head ached. Everything ached. His stomach foremost, his throat, his eyes. He wanted to find the last pieces of her. He could only move slowly, as in a dream. The city, he thought, was unusually quiet. Or was it perhaps the howling, the burning place between his ribs where he was still wind and storm and black skies. Maybe that was louder. His ears roared. He pushed the rubble aside with his hands. The torn flag, half a bench, enamel chipped off a mug, a shredded dishcloth.

Her body had been removed. He stopped looking when he found the space where once had been her desk, her room. She kept their papers in a locked drawer, had beaten his hand so badly when he once tried to look that it broke bone. She always said, you are wicked, wicked boy. She never was his mother.

For as long as he had known himself as her son, he had wondered what it would be like to be someone else. All the paper had been turned to pulp by the rain, gave way to his fingers. He read like drinking. Typed words, CREDENCE BAREBONE, Certificate of Adoption, October 1905 November 1904, “unknown” before then, anonymous, a no one. For as long as he had been her son there had been the El on Essex and the other stop on Canal, the long steps they never climbed, fare never paid, the distance between the track and the sky and the track and the street, and he had wondered if they were all connected somewhere, in the churning smoke from the trains, their thunder and the wheels on the rail, if she would come to claim his body or leave him orphaned then at last in death.

It seemed counterintuitive that he should not be dead.

Only after his body had upheaved the lining of his empty stomach, throat scalding, did he leave. Shaking. Mostly it was cold. He kept the paper, torn and waterlogged, in his jacket pocket. He picked the streets for familiar things. The city greeted him as it always had. Cold, indifferent. He slept in the park. He tried to sleep on the uptown El train from Essex and was hauled down the steps by a policeman. He slept in the church, where it had been, but found it eery. He slept on the steps to a synagogue, though he knew that too much time had passed. The old rabbi, if he was still alive, could be anywhere, would never know his face.

His was miraculously just another face. Miraculously unrecognized. Despite his darkest fears, no one came to arrest him. The city seemed whole. He could not understand it.

Days bled into weeks, one and then two. It was oddly warm for mid-December. He took his daily soup in St. Paul’s. Found himself a new jacket, a scarf, a woollen sweater, a hat. She was not here anymore, he thought. He could allow himself warmth. He slept late when he could find the right spot. He could allow himself such luxuries, though their lustre wore off quickly, they felt false.

Sometimes he dressed in disguise, hovered in the park near City Hall, staring across the street, following the flash of the revolving doors there, heart pounding. It was an empty exercise. He wondered if there was a grave somewhere in the city with no poetry on its marker.

It should be marked that he stole frequently. Bread, clothes, the blanket under which he slept, pennies from the candle boxes in every church from Broad Street to Fifty-Seventh, anything he could get his fingers into. In the public library he shook his head against all offerings of cards and accounts, found the large book of maps and assorted information on all corners of the Earth, and read about Paris. Traced Paris with his finger. The Eiffel Tower. The great archway, Napoleon, the Revolution, the Republic. He dreamt of guillotines and woke in cold sweat. He watched the Woolworth, its comings and goings. Once he thought he saw a face he recognised, a man in a blue coat. He did not go back to the Woolworth, to City Hall Park, left the lower half of the city behind him. It held nothing for him any more.

It should be marked that he had begun to play the host to unholy aspirations. The magic in him had not weakened. He tested it nights on poorly lit backstreets, sent his shadow skittering over brick and scattered trash, scared pigeons, scared rats. He ate church handouts and only what he could steal, could not bring himself to spend this wealth of darkness at the high cost of another life, another death.

He no longer thought about Percival Graves, Ma, or anyone else.

* 

The first time he’d seen it, he was certain he’d imagined the woman with the red feathered hat leaning in to one of the great stone lions guarding the library steps, the lions shifting just so, the tilt of their heads, the witch’s body melting into the stone as though she had never been there at all.

He waited three days. It was risky. There was always the chance that he had been imagining things and would waste his time, or that this entrance lead the way into another one of the Wizarding governments, like the Woolworth, as with Graves. He read about Paris. He worried that the woman had been part of an elaborate plot to lure him from hiding and that they knew and that his days were numbered. This worry was not really new. A variation on old fear, Ma at the foot of the stairs. His pulse had always felt, at any rate, like the ticking of a clock on the end of its wind. He tried to imagine the worst possible result. The men and women in black cloaks with their magic sticks at him again. The same pain, consumed by fire, torn apart. He countered this by reading more about Paris. At night sometimes, he tried to imagine that he could remember certain details about her, Irma Dugard. Whatever the French called their mothers - mama. A coil of black hair at her temple, a lip curved over the edges of her teeth, a wisp of song. He tried to remember what it felt like to be held but stopped quickly. There was no use in that.

The day to try it was December 25th. He thought, with grim humour, that it was fitting. He had no other engagements. Ma had never celebrated Christmas in the usual way. Modesty she had allowed to string up a chain of paper and a garland of rag bows, a chalk cross and a star. They lit a candle and prayed, then worked, always. The same streets, the pamphlets. It had been his favourite day anyway, not for the usual reasons, but because it meant that the streets would be cleared of most foot traffic and they could go home early for toast and hot soup.

Most of Fifth Avenue was deserted, trees glowing brightly through clean windows. The carollers had all abandoned their posts and were likely home further downtown, eating turkeys and attending masses and opening gifts, nothing that he had ever done, nothing that interested him. The library was also closed. His heart raced as he approached its steps. He had waited until precisely this point in the morning, when he could be sure that no one would be looking.

It was the same lion. He stood before it, feeling suddenly stupid, dropped his head into the curve of his spine.

'You’ll have to hurry up quickly and go inside,' said a woman’s voice.

There was no one near, when he looked, just a flurry of blown snow.

'If you don’t go in a minute, I’ll have to close the gate,' said the voice. 'Hurry up. I can’t hang out all day, you know.'

When he laid his hand into her base it was not the cold stone he expected but warm air, a quick rush of it ruffling his collar and his hair. Festive garlands decorated the windows of the shops boxing in the little courtyard in which he was now standing. He blinked at them in alarm and glanced behind him. Fifth Avenue had vanished. In its place stood the stone lion, dusted with a fine snow which was falling not from the sky above but from a spot in between, unattached to any clouds. He blinked.

She winked at him.

His heart beat construction noise, traffic blare. Here, he dutifully noticed, it was still Christmas. Candles flickered and twinkled curiously from darkened shop windows. It was a clean street in the style of Fifth Avenue, though the buildings were small, only one or two storeys. They were all stone and brick. Modern, despite the cauldrons in the windows, the chalkboard ads for quill pens and bottles of ink. Every third or so shop was open still, their signboards written in all the languages he had seen and recognised well enough from his days of proselytisation on the Lower East Side. He felt dizzy taking it in. It was real, a real place. There was the Yiddish word for butcher’s painted brightly over a window display of a dancing boar and a dragon and a string of incomprehensible letters followed by presumably the same message in Chinese, Italian, German, Armenian, Greek, Spanish. Other languages he recognised less. They flashed and changed, adjusting themselves with a manic whirring energy not unlike the billboards around Times Square, but these were not lit by electric lamps.

A flash of English caught his eye. He read, _Studebaker’s Sturdiest Family Brooms - Seat Five! _with the promise of a discount for families of six or more, prices in a currency he could not comprehend, fairytale language, dragots and sprinks, _Exchange galleons sickles and knuts here! Five percent fee! _They were real. He felt light. He paused in the window of a bookshop to peer at illustrated children’s books with moving pictures, comics that squeaked and shouted after him, a manual on _Healing From Forbidden Love: So You’ve Fallen For Your No-Maj Neighbor_, all incomprehensible, impossible, amazing.

His stomach twisted as he left the main courtyard to follow the winding crook of cobbled stone past a darkened clothing shop advertising _Blend-Well Togs: Leave the magic to your personality! (Prices starting at the quarter dragot for a pair of wool socks with a ‘discreet’ warming spell, twenty dragots a silk dress which mended and cleaned itself, fifty for a cashmere coat ‘in the latest No-Maj styles’). _The street was thinly populated. He buried his nose into the knot of his scarf anyway and tugged down his hat. His joy was a funny joy now, clouded, like cream in black coffee. (He would not think of diners, black coffee, cubes of sugar, French fries or hot dogs or the entire dollar tip he’d taken when no one was looking, on their way back out into the cold, as though by keeping it with him he could somehow cling to the moment forever and never leave that warm place, the flower which had already wilted and browned in a broad fist as he had stared in awe and horror.)

He stopped abruptly before a brick wall pasted over with posters. Even the snow was somehow warm here, never melted. It sickened him to think that it had been here all this time. This wonderful place. This warmth, when he had been freezing on every street corner crosswise between Penn Station and Pike Slip for years.

This was where she found him some time later, her hair glinting like tinsel and freckled with snow. She laid her hand across his arm as he was reading the advertisement for the magical circus (One half dragot per adult! Departing for Paris! December 26th! His heart beat so quickly he was sure it would burst, but it did not. He took a breath).

'Don’t worry,' she whispered. Her voice was soft. Still, he fell stiff at her touch and dropped his head. He felt the tug of panic on his lower lip. The only escape that he knew of was back the way he had come, through the talking lion. Close enough? Would he be able to just run through, or was there some trick? She leaned in close and hissed, 'Aw, no, honey, it ain’t like that. I ain’t one of them, all right? Cross my heart. But we can’t talk here. Hold on tight.'

*

Mr. Graves had done this with him often enough that he was no longer surprised when his chest condensed suddenly, his head squeezed until he thought his eyeballs might pop out of his skull. With a loud crack they were gone from the cheerful witch’s street and standing, nauseous and dizzy, in the middle of someone’s kitchen.

She brushed his sleeve before she unhooked her arm from his. Her touch was soft. He jumped away from it anyway. Even his tongue, dry and achey, was pounding. He glanced around quickly; they were standing in the kitchen of a small and heavily decorated flat, not far from the door. To his immediate right was a sofa with pink cushions, a drying rack of lady’s clothing, a small dining table. To his left, he heart thudding, was the door. Following his gaze, she moved to block his path.

'Sorry about that, honey, but I had to get you outta there fast.'

'Please let me go,' he said. He thought it sounded much more self-assured than he felt.

'Well, sure, you can go anytime,' said the woman. 'But I’m only trying to help you. If you’re who I think you are - and I know you are - you shouldn’t be out there like that in the wide open. They’ll lock you up before you can say ‘Mercy Lewis’, and they ain’t gonna be so nice with you after what happened.'

She was using her stick to de-robe. First her pink coat, then her scarf, fluffing her blond curls. He fought the urge to turn away but found it too fascinating. Her coat and scarf levitated themselves to the coatrack. What she now wore was a very nice dress. Nicer than anything he’d ever seen at home. Night-blue silk, new-looking, neatly trimmed. He held his hands awkwardly at his sides. She giggled.

'You’re a real sweetheart, huh?'

He didn’t know how to respond to that. She nodded at the kitchen table.

'Sit down a minute, honey. A body can’t just live on soup and hot dogs, you know. Let me cook you something wholesome at least before you go. You look like you ain’t seen a vegetable all year. Longer? See, that’s no good. You prefer strudel or pie?'

Six months ago he could not have answered that question. He had never had so much as a piece of candy until Mr. Graves and the diner. The thought of it made his teeth ache.

'Oh, gee,' she said. 'Pie it is. Go on -' she shooed him into a chair with the hand that was not holding her stick and gave him a strained wink '- sit down before you drop. I don’t bite.'

His brain felt smudged, as though some unseen force had swept through the still-wet ink of his thoughts until they were nothing but smears. He watched open-mouthed as she orchestrated lunch from the tip of her stick. The magic he knew from Mr. Graves had been subtle, a string of delicate mercies, healed cuts and faded bruises, a poisoned flower. At the point of her stick - her wand, he corrected himself - the kitchen cabinets burst at their hinges. Plates rolled out across the open air and settled themselves onto the table like fallen leaves, cutlery from a drawer, napkins folding into swans and flowers, flowers trimming their own stems and dropping into a vase. He tried not to gape as a pitcher poured him a glass of milk and the glass itself hopped in front of him, nudging itself against the skin of his knuckles.

'Milk’s your favourite,' she said without turning back to face him. 'But you ain’t had it in a while, huh?'

'No.'

Truly the answer was ‘almost never’. He decided it was better to play along in silence for now.

'That’s a good idea,' she said, turning. Before he could ask, she shrugged. 'Don’t worry, honey. I can hear what you’re thinking, but I won’t tell nobody. You was real dizzy with him for a while, huh? It ain’t right what he did to you, or what any of them did. He was the wrong gee, honey. Real evil. He’s in jail now, didn’t you know? He can’t do nothing else to anyone. And the real Mr. Graves, well -'

He busied himself with his milk.

'I couldn’t tell if you liked chicken or beef better,' she said. She gave him a funny look as she carried the rest of the dish by hand, cut him off a thick slice of beef, spooned carrots and potato and cabbage onto his plate. 'Eat up,' she said. 'You had a real hard time lately, didn’t you? Oh, no, honey, she laughed. I didn’t have to read your mind for that. You’re skinny as a fifty sprink broomstick. That’s what my mother used to say, only they was a quarter then, the real cheap ones. You want more potato?' 

*

Her name was Queenie, and she was not at all as he had expected. She was beautiful in the bright kind of way that Credence thought was very pure and that Ma would have called an invitation to sin. Her bright hair framed a square face, blue eyes, almost as beautiful as the lady singer who had let him in the back of the Golden Goose one night in Harlem when it was too cold to make the trip downtown on time. The kind of face that glowed, bright Hollywood smile. She looked like a movie star, though she couldn’t have been much older than he was, and her every word and move was mothering, sweet, gentle. As he ate, Credence felt himself warming. His stomach, unused to the sensation of fullness, pushed taut against the solid boundary of his belt. He sat back apologetically.

'You kept that old belt,' she said sadly, as though she knew. He wished she would leave his head alone, but she held up her hand. 'It’s just that I wanted to tell you,' she said, 'that I’m Teenie’s sister. Tina Goldstein? She’s been real torn up about you, you know. Cries all the time. Oh, she never likes to admit to it. Between you - well, we, everyone, thought you was bopped, honey. I saw all those Aurors - I’ll tell you about Aurors in a second - I saw them take you down with all those curses. It’s kind of a miracle you’re here at all, you know.'

He did not agree, but she only smiled a tight, pained little smile. Suddenly he realised that she looked very tired.

'I ain't gonna try and convince you to stay,' she said. 'But let me make us some tea first. I’ll pack you up something for the boat. That’s where they all go out of, you know. Off the pier. Teenie did a big investigation there a year ago. Well, she wrote up the notes for Mr. Graves. The real Mr. Graves. You just go on up to the fence off Pier Seven. It’s always Pier Seven. Just go up to the fence and they’ll know.'

'The fence,' he repeated.

She bit her lip. Her hand was on the belly of a fat porcelain teapot, he noticed suddenly. It was shaped like an apple and almost as red as one, with sharp petals on its crown. When she noticed his interest, she set it down.

'It’s a pomegranate,' she said. 'From Jerusalem. You know your No-Maj Bible well, huh?'

'Please,' he said. 'What’s a No-Maj?'

'Non-magical people. Not - no, honey, you ain’t a no-maj and you ain’t a squib either. What you got is something else. I don’t know how to explain it. Mr. Scamander could if you waited around to see him, but - say, wanna see a trick? Here, pour a cup for yourself.'

She passed him the teapot as anyone would, waiting until his fingers had wrapped themselves firmly around the handle before letting go. Her smile was bright and wide again. All teeth. Expectant. As soon as he tipped the teapot it began to play music in prickly chimes. He stopped pouring. The music plucked on. He gripped the handle to prevent it falling in shock and set it onto the table with a small thud. He was aware of Queenie in the background as a pale blur, her eyes on his, but he stared only at the teapot. Its rounded belly. A pomegranate. He could not be sure if it was the sadness of the music or something else, something much deeper, that made him want to cry.

'It’s a French song,' she said.

There was something painful in this melody. It pricked at him like the tip of a needle, drew tears from the corners of his eyes. He wiped them quickly. He felt as though he had heard it before, though of course that was silly. Ma had never allowed for anything as frivolous as a music box, not even for Modesty. It only felt familiar because he wanted it to be. He wondered what had happened to his little bird after all. Had it been the force of his magic that tore it apart? Was it crushed beneath the fallen steps?

Only on the first day had he ever been brave enough to wind it. Pet its pointed tin beak with the tip of his finger through the bamboo bars as it chirped at him. Stroke its glued on feathers. It was not a cheap toy. He never liked to think about the baby or its mother or the money that must have been spent on it. She, with her basket and her wide skirt and her loud belly laughter as she bartered for vegetables, had never even seen him standing beside her, his hand in the carriage. Just a fleck on the landscape. He realised now that he had stolen the toy because of the mother and not the child. Flicked out his wrist and taken it, a little thief, as though that bit of tin and bamboo and wind-up life could recreate for him, if only for a minute at a time, what it must feel like to be the body lying in the pram instead of the one outside it.

'I don’t speak French,' said Queenie quietly. He startled anyway, having forgotten for a moment that they were sitting at her table or that the music belonged to her. 'But I think,' she continued, 'that you can say _mama_ just about anywhere, and just about anyone would understand it.'

She was pretending not to look at him. He appreciated the way she turned her head to wipe her own eyes so that he could swipe at his.

'You can stay the night here,' Queenie said once he had set his empty cup back onto the table. The music chimed a final note and also fell silent. She cleared the table with a swish of her wand and sat back to watch him. 'It’s just me and Teenie and Newt here, no one who would make you any trouble. I know Teens’d be over the moon to see you.'

He shook his head, though it felt needlessly cruel.

'Oh well. It’s just that it’s cold outside. But if you give me a minute, I can charm up your coat and your scarf for you. It’s winter in Paris, too, you know.'

As she stood to collect his things, he fell into silent brooding. Why couldn’t he stay here, where someone wanted him, where it was warm and the food was good and the teapot played gentle music? He tried to remember Tina’s face. It was merged with other images, Ma with the belt and the subway and the black cloaks, and he gave up, exhausted, to watch her. Whatever magic Queenie was employing on his winter clothes was very subtle. There were no sparks or sounds.

'There. You’ll look real sharp now. I gave them a little wash and they’ll keep you warm.' 

Her voice was bright again. Like an electric light, he thought. Switch on, switch off. She laid her hand on his sleeve as he turned to leave.

She said, 'I hope you find her, honey. I hope she’s waiting for you.'

*

It should be marked that on the same day that he had stolen the oranges and got the quarter from the rabbi and gave the quarter to Ma and did not lie, he met Percival Graves in a diner on Essex and Delancey. It was mid-November and unseasonably cold. He had jerked away when Mr. Graves took his cut hands between his own to warm them and the look he got in return was seared into his soul and he said I’m sorry, Mr. Graves you just startled me you just startled me. He had wanted to be warm and had feared the source of all that warmth always the wrong source the Hellfire spitting demons.

He felt that his body now was ash felt warmth, remembered hands soft touch belt touch, pain and cold, the needling burning of warming up, how being touched could feel like that. When he wanted it so badly. The week after she’d beat him bloody beat him sideways and crooked, felt his heart hanging in his chest as from a string single vein slow pump his hands hurt, split-palmed. He thought of pomegranates. He remembered a teapot.

He thought, so this is death. But death was only ever an open door for him to fall through, the last floorboard sighing where it divided the still safe hall and the crawlspace from the rest not knowing if she would be waiting for him on the step or if he could go to bed.

All her teaching was wrong or maybe he was the one who misunderstood maybe life was another womb to slip out of screaming and red-faced ‘into the waiting Hands of the Lord’ stray lamb, a single lost lentil in the desert, ascended. Salvation. He tried to remember the date that it had happened but could not. Sometime March. Sometime in the 30’s. At some point he’d stopped marking the passage of days had wanted only to know it was coming always had known that it was coming soon up ahead like the light in the subway tunnel a hard brake a jolt his body still.

All this time the story was about a young man who was not very good or ingenious or beautiful or loved. He felt cheated. The hero was always supposed to be a Buster Keaton black-eyed and brooding beautiful Hollywood smile not chipped tooth not hooked scar on jaw still wearing the belt that drove the Devil from his hands and put the demon in him. All this time the plot had been you suffer but you fall in love you suffer but you find love you suffer but there is God and God is love even if you suffer God is love he died alone. That was not fully accurate because he died in the arms of an Englishman he hardly knew shaking him Tina Goldstein on her knees, having never been anyone’s son or brother or lover. Having stolen the oranges three oranges the bird in the cage from the baby the love from the mother of the baby coveted and wanted and lusted after the oranges and the dollar tip the stone steps in the cemetery the open hurt like a shattered window on Nagini’s face, home.

He thought that he remembered but it was not his memory, the way that grass will grow shyly through the cracks in the berry grasping for sunlight fresh air, tossed slantwise and sideways and crooked by the wind, the way that grass will ripple like waves of gold and green in the sun or brown and wither under grey sky, flood rain, or heat. His was not the story of the hero who climbs the mountain stops the train from crashing, his was the train the long slow crash stretched across old celluloid, it began anyway. Like all stories. He realised in the way that now was not realising anything but knowing, that stories only end as a matter of comfort, convenience, a nervous tic because we are afraid of the long stretch the crash on celluloid the curtains never pull, never knowing what happens next.

*

He was standing in front of the New York Public Library. In looking at the sky, he discovered that it was cloudless and cheerh blue. At his back, Fifth Avenue was deserted. He half expected the lions to turn or speak to him as he climbed the steps, but they stared back in stony silence, defiant and proud, Patience and Fortitude. He nodded at them. His feet found their own way through the main doors to the marbled hall. The library was also empty.

Everywhere that he looked was sunlight. It spilled across the marble like gold silk. He remembered tracing his fingertip over the Arc du Triomphe in the world encyclopaedia in these halls. Sunlight broke through the glass windows with force, spread itself in bars of orange and white and gold like the backs of his eyelids when he had closed his eyes as a boy, standing by the pier of Pike Slip, watching the light flicker across the East River. The sun he had always been jealous of then. That great escape artist. At home in West and East, beloved by all.

Now, as he traced a pattern of its assault through the window onto the wooden floors of the first reading hall, he thought that it was a very lonely star. It held all of these planets and moons in its desperate grasp but found no solace or company in its possession of them. Gellert had shown him once through the ring of a telescope the constellations and other planets, the force of the sun and its great size and its immense heat.

‘One day it will grow very large and consume the Earth, Credence. And everything we will have done before then will be meaningless, for there will be no one left to remember us.’

A disappointing proposition. He had found himself wondering why they bothered doing anything at all.

He followed the wide aisle between reading desks. The air was impossibly still. His footsteps filled the silence in echo. The effect dizzied him. Each pace he was forced to glance back to be sure that he was not alone. The main reading room was empty. The Hall. The steps outside. He blinked. He could not remember the room having ever been so bright.

At the end of the aisle was an odd curve he did not remember. He followed it into a much smaller reading room, a single desk with two chairs and a lamp. All the space that was not window was encased by towering shelves of books. The dust was thick in his nose, swirling gold beneath the window. He did not know why, but he felt that he ought to sit down.

What he had thought was a lamp on the table was actually a teapot, he realised. Startled, he lifted its pointed crown to find that it was filled with milk. He did not know how he knew, but he knew that he should pour himself a cup and that once he did, the pot would begin to play music. He poured.

‘I had wondered when I might finally get to meet you here.’

He did not turn to face the source of the voice or the shuffling of feet and robes across the scuffed floor. He drank his milk. It was very cold and very fresh, despite the warmth of the room. Sunlight poured off the edge of the table in sharp spears.

‘I have always loved this song,’ said the source of the voice as he rounded the table.

‘It’s French,’ said Credence, having just remembered.

The man seated across from him was very old, with a beard long enough to tuck into his belt and blue eyes that reminded him of summer water lapping the rocks off Pike Slip. He seemed to smile to himself as he peered at Credence through the half-moon lenses of his spectacles. He helped himself to a cup of milk. He was humming, Credence realised. His voice was soft when he asked if Credence had ever discovered the composer of the song that he had always secretly referred to for his own benefit as ‘the teapot song’. 

‘It is called ‘Gnossienne,’ said the old man as though he had not voiced this thought. ‘Which means something or other like ‘knowing’. But of that I think you were already aware. There are a great many things which you have now come to know, Credence, are there not?’

‘Who are you?’

‘That,’ said the old man, ‘is another piece of knowledge which you have gathered for yourself already. Under happier circumstances, I would have hoped, but I was alas a much younger and significantly unwiser ‘me’ when last we met.’

The memory returned as he surveyed the old man, his bright eyes, his long white hair and the little smile he was sporting, as though something about Credence’s sullen presence at the table and his half-consumed cup of milk delighted him.

‘I have been waiting for you for quite a long time,’ said Albus softly as Credence pushed his chair back against the flood of recognition.

‘How are you already so old? If you’ve been waiting for me?’

‘Ah. That, I think, Credence, is one of the finer mysteries of the universe, the solving of whichyou and I should have plenty of time now to devote ourselves to. Would you like another glass of milk? It is here entirely for your benefit, as is - ’ He followed Albus’s gesture across the shelves of books, the window, the curved passage leading back to the grandiosity of the main reading hall and the marbled entrance hall beyond. ‘A stunning choice. I am afraid to say that I have never travelled to New York myself, although I hear that it is very pretty in the winter time.’

‘It’s very cold,’ corrected Credence stiffly. ‘In the winter time.’

Now that he had begun to recover from the shock of this place, he felt the old sickness building in him. The bitter taste on the back of his tongue. He pushed his glass across the table where Albus was watching him still through the half-moon spectacles.

His gaze no longer twinkled but hung tightly on the knuckle of Credence’s left hand.

‘I owe you many more apologies than could ever be sufficiently condensed into the mere spoken word.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t suppose it would make much of a difference telling you now that I never intended you to suffer a single moment. And it does not, in fact, make a difference, because I did not intervene when you did.’

‘Why?’

‘Why indeed? I have been asking myself this question for many years now. Or perhaps, for only minutes. I can never be too certain. One finds that time keeps funny habits this side of the veil. But, you asked me why. Why did I leave a vulnerable magical child, an infant, my flesh and blood, at the mercies of a woman who despised magic with every ounce of her being? Why did I not come to find you, to ensure that you were being cared for? Did it ever occur to me that you might be unhappy here or unloved in your new family?

‘Did it ever occur to me that it might be my duty as your only surviving family member, discounting for a moment my charming brother Aberforth, who I have never wanted to admit was a much more capable and loving guardian than I could ever be? I should have kept you close, Credence, but I did not. I should have ensured that you were raised in a family, to be loved and cherished as all children should be, but I did not. I did not come to find you. I did not seek any contact. I did not demand of Mrs. Barebone any further proof of your wellbeing than the concrete fact that you were now hers. Her responsibility. I have done the unforgivable, and you have suffered for it. Worse - I did not learn my lesson the first time. I have made repeat mistakes, you see. There was another boy like you, you know. An orphan. After your time. Did I think of you as I sent him to live with relatives who I knew would never love him or like him or treat him particularly nicely? I wish that I could offer you the happy ending to the story, Credence, but I cannot. I can only sit here with you now, in this very beautiful room, surrounded by all these very wonderful books, listening to this lovely song, and wish that I had done things differently, which will never change the fact that I did not.’

The silence that descended over them was not unpleasant. It was difficult to stay unhappy for very long in this room, with the teapot full of milk and the chiming music box song and the sunlight streaming like honey through the vaulted windows. Credence let the weight of these admissions sink into him. He felt very tired, as though he had been swimming for a long time before washing up on the wrong side of the shore. He had never allowed himself to dream of his moment. He was not well acquainted with apologies and had little use for them. He thought again of Gellert’s telescope and the promised expansion of the sun. Would this place too be swallowed up in its immense heat, forever forgotten?

‘I very much wanted to see you again,’ said Albus quietly. His blue eyes were slowly filling. ‘Not only to apologise to you, but simply to see you.’

‘Well, here I am,’ said Credence, not unkindly.

‘Here you are.’

‘_Ecce homo_.’

He did not know why he spoke those words, of the many he could have drawn from. Albus offered a weak smile.

‘Here is a man indeed,’ he said. His smile grew incrementally and then froze. Credence watched as a tear rolled down the side of his nose and around his mouth before disappearing into his silvery beard. ‘You do look very much like my mother, you know. She was also fond of milk, as it were. And singing teapots.’

‘Are there - ’

‘ - others? Sometimes, yes. But you are looking for someone in particular?’

The idea had come to him suddenly. Now that it had been voiced, Credence felt his heart pounding in anticipation of the inevitable disappointment. Nothing that he couldn’t survive now, he reminded himself, as he was already dead. He almost laughed.

‘Sometimes there are - well, really it depends entirely on the situation,’ said Albus. He looked troubled. ‘I have, for example, occasionally come across Newt Scamander and his wife in various forests and museums. More recently I found myself in Kings Cross Station, although there I was just, to employ a very tired old phrase, ‘passing through’. I have yet to discover the exact mechanism leading from one meeting into the next, but I can assure you that I am more often socially engaged than I ever was as Headmaster of Hogwarts School.’

‘Can we choose?’ Credence asked. He tried to suppress the hopefulness in his voice. He felt it swelling, tight in his throat.

‘As unpredictable as snow in May, I am afraid,’ said Albus sadly. ‘But it was Lady Macbeth, I believe - not a terribly inspiring role model, but a wonderful figure of Muggle fiction - who suggested one must ‘screw one's courage to the sticking-place’. That is exactly the brand of advice I think we would be well-advised to live by. Or to die by, as it were. I have no doubt that we will, in time, find ourselves reunited with all of our lost loved ones. They did not, after all, fall down the back of a sofa. But might I take the liberty of asking, Credence - do you find it a bit stuffy in here? Should we perhaps take a walk out into the street?’

Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. The light was still clear, as though the sun, invisible to him now, were glued at a fixed point directly above the Earth.

‘A forever-afternoon,’ said Albus as they stepped back into the main reading hall. ‘I think we will find, once we leave this place, that we are not in requirement of any of the typical winter gear. In my experience, the weather is never unpleasant.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I think,’ said Albus, ‘that I must always have been here. And sometimes have not been. And perhaps again will not be, and all of that in reverse. Not exactly in this library, you understand - ’ He swept serenely over the golden-silk marble of Astor Hall with his hand. ‘I have been, as one says, ‘around’, as I always will be, and as will you, I should think.’

‘I don’t see a God here,’ said Credence. He stopped short to glance around again, as though expecting at any moment a berobed figure to emerge from the top of a staircase. Albus shook his head and smiled.

‘Another of those delightful mysteries I was telling you about earlier. We think we know the thing and have seen straight through the nature of the thing, only to stumble into the trap of our own ignorance. We are, after all, only in a library. Reading the book is but the first step, is it not? Now we take its words, the very essence of its magic, back out into the world with us. Shall we?’

He extended his arm. After some hesitation, Credence took it.

‘Shall we die a little?’ he recited. The memory of that night felt distant to him now, as though it had been lived by someone else. 

Dumbledore only laughed, pushing the door open, and guided them down the front steps towards the bright expanse of Fifth Avenue.


End file.
